CRV is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups. Since 1970, the firm has backed more than 500 companies across their growth lifecycle.
James serves as a general partner at CRV and holds board seats at several technology companies, including Legit Security, Astrix Security, and Finley Technologies.
Wellington Management led the financing round, which brings total funding to £110m.
"Everyone is focused on building bigger models, but for physical AI, the bottleneck isn't model size. It's data readiness. You can have the most sophisticated model in the world, and it will still fail if the data feeding it is incomplete, inconsistent, or misaligned with real-world conditions. That's the problem we solve."
The Series B round was led by Next47 with participation from Y Combinator, CRV, and Crane Venture Partners.
"In 10 years, every company will have an AI department in the same way that they have an IT department today or risk losing relevance, and Encord will be the only platform they need to accomplish the process of turning data into functional AI models,"
The seed round was co-led by CRV and Earlybird to support team expansion and new banking integrations.
"We literally watched them use a spreadsheet with one hand to count payments and cash with a bank file on the other hand to manually send money to their customers. It was both inefficient and antiquated. Once we saw the problem, we knew there had to be a better way and became determined to create it."